Leave your houses, leave your cars, leave your boxes…

The Consequences of (and remedies for) Procrastination

Yesterday afternoon I finally got around to doing something I’ve been putting off for a couple of weeks now: I took Daegan’s bike to the bike shop for a quick tune-up and check-out. This is definitely something to do before a 600 km bike ride. Who wants to have a massive mechanical failure 50 kilometres from the nearest bike shop in a place with no public transit? Not me!

So good on me. I was preventing a catastrophe. I rode the couple of kilometres to the shop. I had called earlier in the day and they assured me that if I got it in that day and only needed a minor tuneup it would be out on Friday.

I went to the repair section and they took the bike in and had a look, telling him I needed the best tune-up that could be done before Saturday because we are leaving on Sunday. The mechanic took a quick look and said “When you say Saturday, what do you exactly mean by that?” Once he understood my situation he told me the bad news. The derailleur was frozen and couldn’t be fixed until Tuesday. Tuesday would be several days too late if we wanted to ride to Montreal. On the other hand, it wasn’t going to fix itself. It needed to be fixed and so I checked it in and gave up on riding to Montreal this year.

I went home hugely disappointed. What could we do that was fun? Should I cancel the time off and take it later? Maybe I should just turn back and get the bike and see if I could find someone else to fix it. In the end I left it there and went home.

Today, after a somewhat dismal night of alternating between being sad, angry with the shop (Why? Did they make me wait until the last minute?), and angry with myself), I looked at my options. I had a small number of frequent flyer miles, some points with a hotel chain, and two free auto rental days. What could I do with them?

It turns out that with a very small cash outlay we could spend five days in New York City. And so we’re booked to fly out on Saturday and stay until Wednesday. Daegan is now looking at various sources including a favourite of ours, Atlas Obscura, and making a map of things we might want to do.

It’s a hilarious coincidence with all of that happening that Sage wrote an entry on her productivity methods. They’re pretty effective and work really well for someone like her who is generally NOT organized. No I’m not being mean, She said it herself – check out the quote below:

But here’s what I AM good at: creating a system to keep my chaos under control, and then reliably getting tasks done on time. A friend asked about my task system the other day and her eyes got wider and wider and she said, “You’ve made it like a GAME! You should tell people about this.”

After the third time this happened, I decided to sit down and post the details here, in the hopes that it will help my fellow Chaos Demons.

You can read the full entry with all of the instructions as to how to implement it yourself here. Go read it – especially if you need it as much as I do.

I know! We’re really excited. I don’t think we’ve ever had such a combination of both nice weather predicted and actual time in the city. There will be lots of time to just wander which is one of my favourite things to do.